UnitedStack
Harness the Power of OpenStack

Essentially, OpenStack provides a generic data management infrastructure that can be applied to any cloud deployment–regardless of vendor. Initially popular in the U.S., by 2012, OpenStack had reached the cloud computing market in China where a group of Sina cloud computing engineers fell in love with it. Cheng Hui, founder and CEO of UnitedStack, was one of those engineers and he saw huge potential for the development of OpenStack capabilities to serve the domestic market. He believed not only could he improve the adoption of the open source model; he could influence its development domestically and speed its integration. Initially, Cheng Hui found that many domestic companies and teams were engaged in OpenStack in this industry but they had no profound insight. Most of them thought OpenStack as a free lunch, just knew how to use it, but did not know how to develop it. Domestic companies hardly had capabilities to develop OpenStack, only to wait for foreign companies entering and occupying Chinese OpenStack market. At this time, Cheng Hui began to have the idea to lay the foundation of an OpenStack company—UnitedStack.

Hui’s research revealed three primary challenges to CIOs: concern over OpenStack’s stability and its impact on the production environment, insufficient skills in early stages of using OpenStack, and self-service and management of all IaaS solutions in addition to OpenStack. UnitedStack’s OpenStack architecture was designed to improve stability in production by providing controller, network, storage, and compute HA design and functions. A hosted private cloud service mode is available for customers who do not have sufficient skills internally to manage OpenStack. And the “Halo” solution was developed to provide a unified self-service portal that could inter-operate with AWS and VMware besides OpenStack, as well as provide integration with customers’ ongoing SSO and OA systems.

According to Hui, “With the arrival of the big data era, the incremental speed of data is getting faster and faster.” At this stage, whether an Internet application or financial cloud scenario, there are multi-site needs.

We have a deep understanding of the power of the open source community and participate in all aspects of it

In an Internet business application scenario, the customer’s focus is on the continuity and availability of business, hoping to keep business uninterrupted. In financial services, the customers not only need to keep business uninterrupted, but also ensure that the data is secure and prevent data loss. OpenStack capabilities are more flexible and nimble to manage the volume of data and traffic.

In addition, UnitedStack provides an Alarm Monitoring Service which has a user defined threshold visible in real-time through the user interface. The system provides a variety of monitoring indexes including virtual machine, cloud hard disk and public network IP. Users can flexibly view monitoring data for a certain period and set the alarm rules for one or more indicators to send an alarm notification. Through the monitoring service, users can understand the usage of resources, performance and health status of the OpenStack system.

UnitedStack’s core competitiveness has two primary drivers -the spirit of open source and the Internet attitude–which led to development of innovative technologies and functions to improve their ability to compete with an IaaS solution.

The goals of UnitedStack are very simple-to replace the traditional IT infrastructure and build a basic unified service platform based on OpenStack’s cloud computing platform and technologies. The infrastructure management platform and software in the future should be easy to obtain and use, cheap and self-service capable. Per Hui, goals for UnitedStack include “expansion of customer basesand building a platform with high scalability.”